1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to computer-based Web technology, and particularly to automatically populating data in a tree widget for smooth scrolling in a Web browser.
2. Description of Background
Web pages often contain static content that requires refreshing or manual clicking on buttons or icons to reload an entire page of content. A Web page accessing a long list of information as part of the content can result in a substantial delay for a user of the Web page, as all of the content included on the Web page is loaded. With the development of “Web 2.0”, there has been an effort to present Web content in more a dynamic and interactive fashion, making Web pages appear similar to other user applications. Web pages can be constructed using component or control toolkits that comply with standards, such as the document object model (DOM) standard. DOM is a platform and language independent standard object model for representing Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) or Extensible Markup Language (XML) and related formats. Although DOM is not required for rendering an HTML Web page, scripting languages attempting to inspect or modify a Web page dynamically, e.g., JavaScript®, may require DOM compliance.
Web pages can be apportioned into sub-windows or regions using widgets as control interfaces for specific functions. One type of widget that is useful in displaying long lists with hierarchical structures is a tree widget. Tree widgets are typically considered fairly expensive controls in terms of memory consumption and processing time, since they can potentially expand to an unlimited number of tree nodes. This becomes a serious problem in Web browsers that are limited to the number of DOM tree nodes they can handle. Existing tree widgets scale very poorly when trying to suddenly introduce a large number of additional nodes into an internal DOM tree of a Web browser.
Web 2.0 applications are expected to be highly interactive and responsive to user clicks and operations, but existing tree widgets do not scale well in enterprise-level applications to handle a large number of tree nodes in a near seamless manner. Therefore, it would be beneficial to develop a tree widget that can rapidly respond to user interactions, such as scrolling requests to view different portions of the tree, with a smooth and rapid response regardless of the number of nodes in the tree. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a method to automatically populate data in a tree widget for smooth scrolling in a Web browser.